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The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American has an interesting article on the secret to raising smart kids that says that more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings. In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. One theory of what separates the two general classes of learners, helpless versus mastery-oriented, is that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different "theories" of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount. Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. Mastery-oriented children think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating offering opportunities to learn."
People are different. film at 11.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
Smart parents that take the time to educate their kids as well as spending time with them.
example? sure. My daughter can code html very well. I sat down for a few months and showed her how to get going and now she sells myspace templates for $15.00 each to kids at school. She also understands how a car works because I made her come out and help when I was working on the car or my project hotrod. Explaining things to her and answering all her questions. She also can use a GPS (real one not these fluffy naigation toys) as we are always geocacheing every sunday. One year we went geocacheing without a GPS, only topo maps and a compass. she loved the "low tech" approach. She is one of these Abercrombie wearing socks and flipflops in the winter stylish cheerleader types. yet she get's her hands dirty, can change a distributor as good as any certified mechanic and knows when to set aside prissy for fun and work.
She can do things that 99% of her friends can't. she has a higher automotive education than most girls, etc...
THAT is the solution. School will not teach your kids, you have to. Sadly most parents today do not want to bother with teaching their kids.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It could be scuba diving, or building a house, making cookies, or solving fractal matthematics, but the answer was always "I've never tried it."
The danger is not that your children will fail, and have permanently damaged egos-- the danger is that your child will never experience failure, and thus learn the important skill of picking up the pieces and moving on. Parents naturally want to save their children from the suffering that comes from defeat (e.g., the track race on field day, the art competition, spelling bee, science fair, etc.), but this is an important experience, and one that they will eventually have, regardless of how much parents shelter them. I would much rather have my child feel crushed because he lost the Boy Scout knot-tying competition than have his first failure be at that new job out of college. The young adult who knows ego management will be in a much better position to dust himself off and carry on than the college grad who takes failure as a sign of permanent inability.
Last night's On Point featured Tom Perkins, the venture capitalist who funded Netscape, Google, AOL, and so on, and he said something that struck me-- he said that he has failed often, but that his successes outnumber his failures. He also said that his firm has a reputation of betting on the entrepeneur who has failed once before. The entrepeneur who fails, learns from it, and tries again is the kind of guy he wants to invest in.
Scientific American ran some articles last year on child prodigies and expert minds (eg, Expert Mind). The general idea was that child prodigies are not necessarily ``smarter'' than their peers. Instead, they are so passionate about a particular task that they practice significantly more than their peers. That is, hard work accounts for a lot. Being slightly gifted at some task and doing well can be more encouraging than failing, but that just gets the ball rolling. For example, Tiger Woods played hours of golf--he would practically beg his parents to take him out to play.
People aren't born knowing chess openings or golf swings. Helping children find activities that really interest them can be hugely rewarding-- not because they should become child prodigies, but because then the process itself is satisfying, too.
It doesn't help those who are fast learners to sail through anything, yet the American educational system ignores the so-called "gifted", or just piles on more homework instead of making things challenging.
The result, children like the Jonathan of the article. They crumple at the first difficulty and never recover.
I don't think the bulldozer parents, those who shove all obstacles out of their children's way, help either.
Consistently telling a kid that (s)he is stupid will cause the kid to believe he is stupid. Wow! such insight!
Wrong-o. Consistently telling a kid that successes are due to being smart will cause them to believe the opposite as well - namely, that failures are due to *not* being smart. On the other hand, telling a kid that successes are due to hard work will lead them to believe that failure can be turned around through diligence.
Read it slower next time.
As someone who failed their A-Levels (that's post school, pre uni 16 - 18yr old education for the non-Brits) miserably having been told for years I have to succeed, that I have to get top grades and so forth to go to uni and do amazingly only to not do so great and fall into a pit of "I'm stupid, I can't do this, it's too hard for me" and then giving up.
7 years down the road, thanks for the open university (www.open.ac.uk), an establishment that gives not a shit about league tables but instead actually cares about learning, education and research you know, the things Unis are meant to be about I am now a first class honours computing and mathematical sciences graduate. Not only that but I achieved this whilst working full time and in 3 years, so around 40 - 45hrs work a week and around 32hrs studying, I also feel that what the article suggests is true, that intelligence isn't something that's entirely fixed - some take things in easier than others certainly whilst others have to work hard but I do not feel any more that there's many areas beyond my grasp if I have the time, money and inclination to learn them. This is why I'll soon be starting my second degree in Physics which I will follow up with a Masters and hopefully eventually a phd. Why you ask? Because when you're not forced to learn, and when you're learning because you want to learn, learning is fun and there's little you can't do if you have the raw motivation of wanting to learn behind you.
Fuck the people who tell you you're stupid, it's them that make you stupid. Don't let them get away with it - defy them and learn anyway so that you can come back and gloat about how wrong they were.
That's why the trend towards things like "noncompetetive sports" for kids drives me up a wall.
The theory, apparently, is that if you don't keep score, the little snowflakes won't get their feelings hurt by losing.
That's not to say that winning is everything; in fact I think kids can learn more about hard work and perseverance from losing.
Just wait until these kids start applying for colleges and jobs, unaware that reality deals harshly with those unprepared to earn their place in the world.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
RTFA. It's not about mental ability. It's about how open children are to changing their abilities.
Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can. If they have been told that their mental ability/disability is fixed then they won't.
America, Home of the Brave.
I am learning electric guitar. I see the aforementioned "nature v. nurture" debate all the time. When discussing technique, some people progress a bit faster on the instrument than others and attribute it to natural talent. But everyone hits a wall eventually and then it boils down to perseverance and dedicated practice. Neither of those things is fun, especially when you just want to rock out. Luckily there are few things I like more than a challenge, so my slow rate of progress does not always deter me.
But I think kids have an advantage here, not because of their more malleable brains (although that helps) but because they often have fewer preconceptions that they should be immediately successful in what they do. I tend to stick to doing what I'm good at for most of the day and try to avoid being bad at things. I think our culture reinforces this point quite a bit with talent search shows and whatnot. But that is another discussion.
"It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense."
-- Miller, W. I. (1993).
Humiliation. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
I think it's important to teach children that they are NOT special, that they can't do everything necessarily, to be cool with that, and that they have to be aware of their areas of lack of knowledge and work further towards improving them. The more you learn and the more you understand, leads to greater appreciation of how much you still don't know. Know that there are others who have skills and knowledge you don't have and suck up to them to learn from them.
The power of intelligence rests on understanding your own limitations and working hard to overcome them. Adults who think they know it all are most often idiots, and unfortunately many are also raising children.
Which leads me to another fave quote:
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
-- Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man. (London: John Murray)
Er, no, I'm not confident I know everything about this topic! ;-)
Most of the more down-to-earth people I know see it exactly the other way around: The struggle is what they hate, the kill is what gives them satisfaction.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
-Philosophy is more or less useless, and always has been. I hold it in roughly the same regard as theology. (Except some British philosophy of science, of course.)
-The rest of your post consists of a mix of gibberish and truism. Empiricism is indeed error-prone. But it sure beats the options - such as wishful thinking, ideology and religion (not to mention philosophy).
-Correlation often implies causation. What's your point? Who exactly are you referring to?
Well... from the article:
"Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort."
That little prick was writing operas by the time he was 4 years old. How much "tremendous and sustained effort" can a 4 year-old have made?
Why are we so unwilling to admit that some kids are born smarter than others? From high-school on, I always found tall, slender, smart girls hot. I married a tall, slender, smart girl. My daughter is now a tall, slender smart girl. I am not particularly smart (except for when it comes to picking a mate). Who wants to bet that Britney Spears' kids probably won't win a Nobel prize in physics, even though they are probably go to fancy private schools and will have every advantage (except a stable home life, of course)?
All I'm saying that if you want to have really smart kids, it's good to start with at least one really smart parent. Beyond that, the affiant sayeth not.
You are welcome on my lawn.
For those of you who are too, ahem, busy, to read the article it says that if you create an environment where the child's ego and self-worth are linked to his or her intelligence they will likely avoid situations that will challenge them intellectually.
Actually really interesting stuff.
-- The unsig...
In many cases children are merely vanity accessories for their parents' fashionable self-esteem. A good, smart child is better for showing off than a dented, rusty child, with bad brakes, and a...oh, sorry. Was I talking about children or cars?
Commodities. Many parents have reduced their children to off-the-shelf extensions of their own egos. And what do many do if they raise a lemon? They complain to the manufacturer! No, seriously, it's the teacher's fault, society's fault, anyone's fault but theirs.
Is overpraising a child detrimental? Only when the praise serves as a vain reminder to the parent or teacher that they should get the gold star for the child's accomplishments. The best parents/teachers are those that acknowledge that a child receives personal accolades upon merit, and are willing to accept an altruistic repose with regard to success ownership.
Can parents over/underpraise their children? Yes, but you must know the root cause of why they do it in the first place. After all, the children are merely pawns in the vainglorious pursuit of parents salving their own psychological issues when they were children.
- "Perhaps it's a psychogenic disorder."
-v.- "Of what specific nature?"
In education we call this "failure attribution" and the article misses another possibility: The Teacher Just Doesn't Like Me. My context is high school. Unfortunately I've met numerous parents who perpetuate the idea that low performance stems from personal feelings of the teacher. This is usually the result of:
The point is that it's possible to attribute your failure to others, and that this behavior is learned. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's entirely learned. Parents go so far out of their way to protect their child's self esteem that it becomes completely divorced from reality. So you get kids who do bad things and feel great about themselves. Or you get very lazy children who want (and expect) you to pick up their slack. To the point, you get children who have no interest in self-improvement because they think they couldn't possibly be improved upon. Call me old fashioned, but things can always be done better.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
The point is found in the opposite, that if you don't believe you can improve yourself, you will never bother trying, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As Homer Simpson would say, "The lesson we learned here today is never, never try."
Here is a tried and tested way to almost gaurantee you have a smart child:
- Start reading to them VERY YOUNG.
I was reading on my own before the age of three and have had a life long adoration for literature. How did I learn to read? Simple. My mom read a book to me EVERY NIGHT as far back as I can remember (and then even before that) and let me follow along with her as she pointed to each word she read. Eventually, I didn't need her to do that anymore and I would toddle off into a corner with a stack of books on my own.
- Read books yourself. If your child sees you reading books for enjoyment and paying attention to the newspaper, your child is more likely to do the same.
- Allow your children to engage you in intellectual conversations. The worst thing you can do is, when your child starts a conversation or asks questions or wants to give you their thoughts on a topic, is slough it off or reply with only the vaguest of attention. No, you can't give your child constant un-divided attention. Your child needs to know that talking and debating and sharing thoughts and opinions and information is valued, encouraged and important. If all you engage each other in is conversations about last night's episode of your favorite sit-com, your kid is going to learn that consuming entertainment and keeping your mouth shut is what matters.
- Give your child freedom. I was able to bicycle and walk around the neighborhood (and beyond) when I was seven and eight years old. I was able to take the bus about fifteen miles into downtown Portland to explore the city, hang out at Powell's City of Books and practically live at the central library. I has a yard bigger than a postage stamp that you could almost get lost in. I built tree forts with my friends, invented games, dug giant holes and tunnels under ground. Played with my grandfathers carpentry tools to make stuff. Had a chemistry set. Had a library card. Had time to myself. Today, kids have their whole life planned and structured, are often restricted to a small area of freedom, can't roam anywhere on their own, and can't play with anything sharper than a spoon. As a kid, I smashed my fingers, sprained my hand and foot, cut my finger to the bone (and would have needed stitches, if we weren't camping 200 miles from the closest city at the time), hammered my finger, burned myself, cut myself with a handsaw and lots of other stuff. At twelve, I went down to the local car body shop and they let me have a chunk of steel. A simple rectangular block of it that I ground, sanded and shaped into an actual knife all on my own. Then I learned how to make a handle and rivet it all together, including using an expensive (and maybe dangerous) heavy duty drill press. Did I do lots of dumb stuff? Did I probably avoid serious harm many times, just by the skin of my teeth? Probably. But god damned, if I didn't learn a lot in the process and develop a lot of character through my inquisitiveness.
Funny how you put together one of the more coherent, better spelled, and most readable /. posts ever.
If you had the defeatest attitude that you could never get better, that those with good grammar just had it and others don't, I suspect that would not be the case. Your efforts may have been greater than others, and you may not be an Oscar Wilde, but at the same time you are probably well above average (for the nation, keep in mind that average is really stupid).
I left this post completly un-edited, even for spelling that auto spellcheck is flagging, I do that so you can see true bad spelling and grammar, and yet there was only a couple words wrong.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
But I don't think what's under discussion here is really "intelligence" per se. It's more akin to "effectiveness". "Intelligence" is just a term that's being used in this context to mean "how good you are at doing stuff that's hard".
There might indeed be some distinct limits on a given individual's "intelligence", but the limit on what you can accomplish is rarely set by that, it's usually set by numerous other factors, not the least of which is what your attitude towards accomplishing "things that are hard" is.
I liked the article.
I'm thinking of using it to counterbalance what I feel is an overemphasis on Myers-Briggs categorizations that are being used in some of the classes I work with. (I supply "back office" support to an adult education program that changes individuals from welfare recipients to taxpayers).
I also like most of what I see in the slashdot comments. Though it does seem to me that several have missed the point: it isn't about spending quality time with the kids; it is about setting up a situations where they might learn how to learn.
I think the real point is that environment can spoil natural intelligence if the intelligence is not fostered with a good work ethic. I doubt many on this forum would deny the genetic predispositions to intellect.
-l
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Accomplishing any task requires 3 things.
1. Innate ability.
2. Training / Education to develop that ability
3. Diligence to work on the task until it's done.
I will probably never run a mile in 4 minutes because I don't have the innate ability to do that, and even if I did, I haven't developed that ability through training and diligence. I can design a web site or repair a pinball game, because I have the talent, the training (some of it self-taught, but that counts), and I work at it.
no big sig
It seems to ignore a third view -- that intelligence is (pretty much) fixed, but we need to learn to use it. The capacity of a beer tankard might be fixed, but a pint tankard is as useless as a half-pint tankard until you put some beer into it.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That little prick [Mozart] was writing operas by the time he was 4 years old. How much "tremendous and sustained effort" can a 4 year-old have made?
The article isn't saying that everyone is born with the same intellect - the article is saying that everyone can develop their intellect through "tremendous and sustained effort."
If Mozart had been a lazy SOB and retired at age 4, and I hadn't been a lazy SOB, the article suggests that I could lap Mozart despite starting much lower than him.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I eagerly await the research that identifies the genetic marker for a predisposition to seizing onto overly-simple explanations for complex traits and/or behavior.
And most generalizations are bad. Seriously though, you seem to be exhibiting classic hindsight bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias. The point of psychology isn't to study what is already common sense (as most people here on Slashdot seem to think - I just love generalizations, don't you?), but to see if common sense has any factual basis.
Take for example the idea a while back that increasing a child's self esteem would make them better students...which lasted until PSYCHOLOGICAL studies showed (through scientific, empirical observation, I have to point out) that inflated self-esteem made children more prone to frustration and giving up after failure.
The point is, what seems obvious may only be so because you're constructing a rationale ad hoc. If the study had found that intelligence was innate (and this was "obvious" to many people beforehand, hence the study), then I'm sure that people on Slashdot would be tripping over themselves to say "and yet again, psychology comes up with another pointless study on something obvious".
But, what you can do to increase the chances that someone will be SUCCESSFUL in life is to encourage and reward effort and work. For instance, if you kid gets an A, say "wow, you WORKED REALLY HARD to earn that A, great," and don't say "Wow, you're so smart!" Because if the kid later fucks something up, you want their mental arithmatic to be "I need to work harder" -- which anyone can do -- and not "I am a dumbass, which can't be changed." -- which doesn't encourage success. Ditto if they're failing: "you need to work harder at math" is what you should say, according to the latest research (which TFA is about, although I didn't read TFA, but rather another about the same study).
Some of the most successful people (CEOs, high achieving and famous game designers, etc.) I know are not super smart, they are just very motivated and work very hard. Some of the biggest failures I know (suicides, guys actually living in their parents' basement, etc.) are incredibly smart. As I get older, it seems that motivation, effort, and the skills needed to apply effort are way more important than raw IQ.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Homer was saying not to attempt anything, ever.
My sister is 16 years younger than me, and when she was about 8 I started taking her whitewater kayaking (a sport that I love). She got incredibly frustrated when she couldn't get the boat to go where she wanted it to (a common problem when learning to whitewater kayak). This mirrored other experiences where she would get extremely frustrated when accomplishment didn't come easily.
Rather than refer to intelligence or smarts or ability, my tack was always to emphasize that it is difficult to learn things. I tried to manage her expectations by reminding her that the process of learning always involves failure, so if she wanted to learn anything she better get used to failing and getting frustrated as she learned. "If you could do things right away it wouldn't be called 'learning'."
She did become an ok kayaker, although she's more into karate and volleyball now. But as she's grown up we've seen less pouting and tantrums, and more and more confidence.
I guess that implicit in my message is the assumption that she could learn anything if she tried hard enough. But I didn't couch it in that language.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
So you think a five-year-old should be "responsible for [his] own education"?
This idea that parents should take themselves out of the schooling picture is asinine. It's up to the parents to make sure the kids are doing their homework. It's up to the parents to make sure that their child has enough ability to read, write, and perform basic math functions. Ultimately, the parents are responsible for the child. Not the school. You can't blame the school for your child's stupidity if you take zero active interest in your child's academic and intellectual development. Sure, the school is there to teach the kid, but the parents are there to make sure the kid is developing properly. If you send your child to school (any school, public or private) but never make them do homework and never expect them to pass a class, they're going to go to college with the idea that they don't need to learn and that it's ok to fail and anything and everything...and they're going to end up failing and finding themselves unable to get a decent job.
Failure makes us stronger. But if you only ever fail, and you never learn how to succeed, you're going to lead one miserable life.
As far as "forcing kids to learn what they don't want to learn" - it's great practice for the real world, where you constantly have to do things you don't want to do (mow the lawn, fix the toilet, deal with a child who won't stop vomiting at two o'clock in the morning, go to work, wake up early, etc.).
I'm a geek girl. Seriously.
Heh, among my study group friends we had a saying, "Remember the Indians". Racist overtones aside, we were alluding to the immigrant students in our classes who seemed to always be asking incredibly stupid questions in great volume.
Everybody else just kept rolling their eyes since they already knew(or at least thought they knew) the answers to what was being asked. Then when test time comes around, the grades were what mattered, and while some of those people rolling their eyes actually did know the answers already, the majority didn't know them as well as they thought, or at least not as well as the students who were constantly hounding the teacher with questions and studying for hours to make up for any lacking areas of comprehension.
So we'd repeat that phrase to remind ourselves to never forget that lesson in hubris, and if we ever doubted our potential to get a good grade, we always had the opportunity to ameliorate our shortcoming with time and effort in the same way that those students kicked our asses.
Sorry, that isn't the theory at all.
In fact, the article reflects more of the reasoning behind not keeping score.
The reason for doing it is to reduce the impact of the over-bearing and over-controlling adults who get too wrapped up in the scoring and the winning/losing. When the adults get too worried about winning, the kids end up in an environment where they are under pressure to reduce risks. And reducing risks means not trying new ideas on the playing field because they might not work which could in turn cause the game to be lost. Or worse the coach reduces risk by not putting certain players in the game, and then those same players have less opportunity to develop.
Those players will develop something though, and that is the belief that to avoid losing the best way is to not try in the first place.
There's a difference between four years of one's (semi-)adult life, and starting from scratch.
Or, out of those four years, should we count the first 1-2 years where Mozart was probably barely able to hold on to a pencil and do something nondestructive to/with it?
This article is a subtle attack on the conceit of many geeks, particularly underachieving ones, who flatter themselves on "being smarter" rather than focusing on what they are accomplishing.
Too many people see intelligence as part of their identity, rather than as being the equivalent of a muscle they should be training. That itself is both a kind of narcissism and simple laziness: if I "am" smart, I don't have to do anything to validate myself. It's why so many geeks seem to "peak" intellectually at high school just like jocks peak athletically.
Yes, Mozart was born a genius. But that doesn't doom those of us who weren't. It's comparable to athletic talent - there are some people who were born enormously talented, and don't have to work hard to be great athletes. But the sports world is full of people of average talent who worked their asses off, and achieved greatness despite not having "natural" talent. The very best, of course, are those who combined natural talent and hard work - Tiger Woods being a prime example. Going back to intelligence, yes, of course some kids were born smarter. But those who weren't can close the gap through hard work, and often surpass the "smart" kids who never learned to challenge themselves. That's not to say that they'll catch the smart kids who also work hard.
All kids are not equal, but encouraging effort and achievement is good for all kids. Praising natural ability encourages reliance on ability over effort. Teach your kid to be an overachiever, not an underachiever, regardless of their inherent talent or intelligence.
I think the lesson you learn from competitive sports is that losing isn't failure if it's an honorable loss. When my kids at school tell me about games they won or lost I always ask them what they did (or the other team did) better in order to win. The answers get better and better as the year progresses, which is a good sign.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
This point is perhaps particularly relevant to the extremely gifted. Lack of challenge and lack of feedback can easily produce the 'helpless' personality type even in people with an IQ of 200. Going to a school where there is no possible way of failing prepares you for real life in no way at all. Speaking from my own experience, here in Quebec, school grades of 98% are eminently attainable without real effort, and there is no higher grade (god help those in places with letter grades!). If you are one of the students who can do this (and the exams are structured so that you can usually do well simply on the basis of internal evidence; I think it possible that a sufficiently cynical teacher could teach average students to ace them cold), no one will believe you when you say you are having trouble understanding the material, and no one will provide you with any motivation to do any better—or frankly, any guidance about anything. When you get into the real world and people start asking you to do the impossible, guaranteed failure scenarios being a genuine part of reality, it all falls apart. It's a big shock, and many of the most valuable people are lost, I think.
On the contrary, my expectations were higher than anyone else's. That was one of the things that infuriated me about her teachers was their low expectations.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Children using the Suzuki Method would be a good example not only for your point, but the topic at hand. I'm amazed at what my 5 year old daughter can play (now starting her second year) and she was actually fairly far behind the others who started at the same time. Within the last month or two, she's passed most of them, and it's largely been a matter of getting her to understand the work ethic involved. We hear the same from all of the other parents.
Programmers in mirror are brighter than they appear
Well, no, its saying that equating good performance with "smart" and bad performance with "stupid", whether it is attributing success to "smart" or failure to "stupid" (which is, accurately or not, perceived to be innate) will lead a child to perform more poorly than they would if their success or failure was credited by parents, etc., to good or bad effort (which is, accurately, perceived to be a choice.)
You are conflating performance with intelligence which is exactly the problem the article highlights.
"Working around" does not mean the same thing as "changing". For instance, upthread you mentioned having terrible handwriting. And yet, I'm not having any difficulty reading what you've written: it's all perfectly legible. You may never be a professional calligrapher, but you can work around that by typing your words when necessary.
Hypothetical example: someone who loves science and technology, grasps the big picture, and is good at making connections and explaining concepts. But say he is really, really, bad at math. He can decide that the math weakness means he's "not smart enough" for a science-related career, and take a job he finds dull and uninspiring. Or, he can stick with it long enough to discover that he has the rare talent of being able to write clearly and accurately about scientific topics for a non-technical audience-- and fulfill his desire to work in a scientific field by being a science writer instead of, say, an engineer.
I agree with you that the human mind is not a tabla rusa where we can each be equally talented at anything with the proper effort and encouragement. However, I do believe that, from your quote, "Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can." It just depends on what one means by "work around".
I'm very bad at simple, mundane, routine tasks, because my mind wanders and I have a hard time paying attention. I'm never going to be particularly good at things that require real attention without engaging me cognitively. But I can work around that by using what I'm good at (coding & scripting to automate), and/or hiring out what I'm bad at (say, routine housework). But if i had been taught growing up that being bad at these things meant I was too dumb even to do incredibly simple tasks, I probably would never have learned how much better I am at more complex tasks.
If you mean their raison d'etre is to make kids unmotivated, I think you hit the nail on the head.
The school system isolates smart kids from any meaningful feedback except test scores, and it accustoms them to the constant drumbeat of, "Wow! You're great!" Eventually, they start to panic and feel like failures whenever they don't hear it.
The not-as-smart kids who are just interested in having a decent job and a decent life are unmotivated because they feel completely cut off from the real world. They all have, or start with, a strong desire to work to improve their own lives, but they're told to do schoolwork, and there is no credible person available to explain why schoolwork is relevant to the real world. Teachers can't convince kids they know anything about "the real world." (Teaching does share substantial "real world" aspects with other professions, but those common aspects are paperwork and bureaucracy. It's best not to mention paperwork and bureaucracy when attempting to motivate teenagers.)
In all cases, kids end up feeling trapped in the system and inhibited from working to further their own interests.
The intellectually oriented kids are best off. They understand that doing coursework prepares them in some measure for their future work. Obviously it isn't ideal, but it isn't completely worthless, either. (If you thought it was completely worthless, well, you weren't smart -- at least not about that particular question.) The not-so-intellectual kids have good opportunities in school to work to their own future benefit, and are repeatedly told so, but they don't really believe it. And you can't blame them. There's no practical way for kids to verify the value of the work. They have to rely entirely on the credibility of their teachers, who have little credibility to tell any kids (except aspiring teachers) that schoolwork has any relevance to their future. Every ounce of skepticism felt by students translates into lower morale, less effort, less achievement, and more frustration.
The solution? Make education an attractive profession. Double the salaries; recognize and reward talent; make sure teachers get more payback for their hard work than an occasional picture in the local newspaper. Teachers must be successful professionals, not just idealists or old-fashioned wives or people who just wanted lots of time off and didn't care what they were paid. Education has to provide opportunities for smart, competent, materially ambitious people. Otherwise you end up with only idealists on the one hand and underachievers on the other. Students respond to idealists but fundamentally don't identify with them; they tend to regard them as out-of-touch with the real world. As for the underachievers, well, who can feel good about taking advice from them and *shudder* following in their footsteps? No, kids need to be taught by people they can optimistically identify with. For the vast majority of kids, that means bright, hardworking, materially ambitious people, people who currently regard education as a shabby backwater.
The current culture of 'trying is what matters' is just as bad as the culture of 'you have what your born with'. When you tell a kid that is failing at algebra that "you need to work harder at math", and they are already working their ass off, you are doing just as much harm as if they think that they just don't have the brains for it. It reminds me of the 80's anti-cocaine commercial with the guy walking in circles. He was repeating over and over. "I do more cocaine so that I can work harder. I work harder so I can earn more money. I earn more money so that I can buy more cocaine. I do more cocaine so I can work harder...." Over and over. How bad do you think a kid feels when they are simply incapable of doing something, and they are told over and over that it is because of a lack of character. That is what you are telling them, whether you realize it or not. You are telling your kid that their inability to understand Applied Statistics coursework or multi-dimensional algebra in their head is because they just didn't try hard enough. It also reminds me of the debate I had as a kid with my father. He was never happy with my performance because he always felt I could do better just by trying harder. He felt that the most important thing was to try hard. (Well, actually, he was just an ass, and that was his excuse, but anyway.) I still remember him telling me that employers want people that will try hard. Which would always be countered with the question: "Would you rather have a heart surgeon that performs your surgery effortlessly, or one that has to try real hard?"
This is a classic debate of nature vs. nurture. Well, the answer to the question of which defines your intellect, nature or nurture, is "Yes". I consistently tell my kid that if he keeps practicing, he will get better at things, but I will never want him to believe that the only reason he failed at something is that he just didn't try hard enough. His inability to bench press 800 pounds at 3 years old has nothing to do with not trying hard enough. No matter how hard he tries, he is not going to do it. As a matter of fact, it is likely that if his sole focus for the rest of his life was to spend every last bit of effort in him to bench press 800 pounds, he would still never be able to do it. Even though others have. Of course being able to bench press 250 pounds as an adult will likely be a matter of how much effort he puts into getting there.
Even when we rule out the extremes of human achievement, we need to look at the fact that we are not immortal timeless beings. We have a limited amount of time. The time we have is divided up into various tasks that we put effort into. If our kids put more effort into playing baseball, they will have less time available to put effort into playing piano. This is just a physical limitation of the universe we live in. So, when you tell your kid to try harder in one subject (not limited to school studies), you are telling them not to put that effort into another subject. The real key is to guide their time and effort into subjects that will achieve both the greatest results, as well as be the most useful.
Lets take a kid with the genes to easily understand music and poor genes to understand algebra. Neither of these skills are used by most people on a day to day basis, so neglecting either one is not going to prevent someone from being successful. If this hypothetical kid spends a years worth of effort into learning music instead of algebra, he will end up smarter.
The key is to make sure your kid is competent in all areas that they need with enough leeway that they are not just scraping by, and then to enhance the areas that will give the greatest effect. Obviously that is a gross over simplification, but the principal is there.
Which is pretty much how the parent poster put it. Your genes AND your personality define limits on your ability to exert yourself physically. Your upper limits for intelligence, physical fitness, and many other traits are indeed in your DNA, but you must reach them for the limits to be relevant. If you teach a child that athletic ability does not improve with exercise, he will not be likely to exercise and obtain the corresponding benefits. The article suggests that if you teach a child that academic aptitude is not strengthened primarily through study and hard work, these, too, will be eschewed.
But, by the same token, two children of different families or different ethnicities can do the same exercises (mentally, physically, whatever) and (1) progress at a very different pace, and also (2) reach different absolute limits of ability regardless of effort.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Seriously...
Nothing brings out the people proclaiming themselves 'smart' like a story about education or child-raising. There's seems to be no way that anyone can have a conversation on this topic that doesn't just slide off into self-praise.
Thank God I went to a selective public high school that nutured our great modesty as well as our astounding intellects, so I'll never fall into that trap.
It must have been the way that I was raised to be both patient, hard-working and experimental, as well as my excellent genetic endowments for intelligence, sensitivity, creativity and emotional intelligence.
On the other hand, in some places the primary virtue of public school is that it insulates children from their parents and community :-)
Optional schooling or privatized schooling -- either one -- would limit the vast majority of lower-class kids, and a very large number of middle-class kids, to the class they were born into. They would be limited by the attitudes and understanding of their parents and the people they look up to. Perhaps by some theory they could be said to deserve that fate, but even from selfish point of view, our economic fate is tied to their future economic productivity. I think far more is gained by rescuing talented kids from those classes than is destroyed by marginally limiting the development of kids with savvy parents.
While this may be true (and an easy way to net mod points), the article is not about encouraging your children -- it's about explaining success in terms of effort rather than innate skill. It's not about saying "You will never fail"; it's about saying "You can do something to reduce the chances of failure". If this is what you meant by encouraging children, it would be difficult to over-encourage them, in the same sense that it would be difficult to teach them a fact that was over-true.
Well I've been lurking around here since 2000(?), and since then I've a child of my own. As much as I love the tech stuff, OS wars, etc. family topics really grasp my attention. I'm so thrill to see such an interesting and 'intellectual' discussion/tips on raising children here at /. Thanks for so many useful comments and tips.
I think most of us wish to spend as much time with our children as possible. My boy's the greatest joy and grace bestowed upon me. But with longer work hours (thanks to remote login, globalization), made longer with CPEs (thanks to continuing professional education), plus the physical limits of the human body (we just want to crash when we finally head home), plus the nagging wife (maintenance), it can be challenging to set yourself in the right frame of mind for 'undivided love, attention and patience to the child'. By the time you're done with the chores (so you can continue to bring bread to the table), it's 2am, and the child's fast asleep. Hey, we don't all work on a farm.
My 2 cents: who said raising kids was easy? Say goodbye to the PS3, your health (sorry, no more sporting weekends), your social life (no more pubs after work), that new digicam/laptop (sorry, the child's education fund comes first). With the limited time and stamina left in us, what remains has to go to the child, if he/she's ever going make it (the education system's not going raise your child).
And this is just one child we're taking about. I heard siblings also comes into play. I've love to do that (not for the smart factor, but simply because I love a larger family) - if they could keep our jobs from India, and if there were 48 hours a day.
Outside of overweight beta males and their dyslexic offspring, who cares about the scoring of kids' games?